House OKs Budget With Defense Cuts : Reagan’s Charges of Breach of Faith Ignored in Party Vote Over 1987 Plan

The Democratic-led House, in the face of President Reagan’s blistering charge that its “radical anti-defense budget” amounted to “nothing less than a breach of faith with our common duty to protect this nation,” passed a fiscal 1987 budget Thursday that would slash Pentagon spending below today’s levels.

The budget, which passed on a 245-179 party-line vote, would also raise taxes $7.3 billion beyond the relatively minor increase that Reagan has said is the maximum he will accept.

It would set total government spending next year at slightly less than $1 trillion, of which almost $144 billion would be needed to pay interest on the ballooning national debt. The projected deficit, now running at about $200 billion, would fall to $137 billion, $7 billion below the level required by the Gramm-Rudman budget-balancing law.

A spending plan passed several weeks ago by the Republican-led Senate would confront Reagan with a tax hike equal to that contained in the House package, allow no defense spending growth beyond inflation and leave a deficit of $144 billion, exactly the Gramm-Rudman target.

Serves as Guideline

Even when the House and Senate agree on a compromise budget, it will not have the force of law. Instead, it will serve as a guideline--and a largely voluntary guideline at that--for subsequent spending and tax legislation.

Where the House budget differs most sharply with the Senate--and with Reagan--is over defense. Reagan insists upon an 8% increase after inflation, now expected to run at about a 3% rate. The Senate approved $301 billion, just enough to keep spending abreast with inflation. The House approved only $285 billion, 2% below current defense spending.

Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.), arguing for the House’s defense budget, said: “What the American people have been telling us is we want a strong defense, but we think we can have one--in fact, we know we can have one--by spending less money more wisely. Force-feeding the system (with money) has resulted in weapons systems that cost too much.”

Harshly Worded Letter

Reagan, in a harshly worded letter Thursday to House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.), warned that the spending cuts advocated by the House would require eliminating an entire Army division, an aircraft carrier battle group from the Navy and tactical fighter wings from the Air Force. He also listed dozens of other military programs--all of which provide jobs in individual congressional districts--that might be axed.

“We did not spend the last five years making our military more competitive and America secure again, only to undo it all in our second term,” Reagan wrote in the four-page letter.

Michel, citing the letter during House debate, said: “It’s quite clear that the Democratic strategy was to beat the hell out of the defense program in order to placate social welfare” programs, most of which would be frozen but not cut by the House budget.

But House Budget Committee Chairman William H. Gray III (D-Pa.) insisted that the House’s defense budget would not leave the nation vulnerable to “the Russians coming up the Potomac.”

And even the House Republicans’ budget alternative--which failed on a 280-145 partisan vote--would have meant holding defense spending to its current level with no adjustment for inflation.

Bitter Negotiation Expected

The military spending number will be the major area of contention when a House-Senate conference committee meets, possibly as early as next week, to begin what could be a long and bitter effort to negotiate a compromise between the budgets passed by each house.

Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), whose Senate plan was criticized by the White House as too weak on defense, has pledged not to go any lower on defense spending. He said the House plan’s “bogus defense numbers” are “woefully inadequate.”

On the sensitive issue of taxes, House Democratic leaders maintained that the House-passed budget does not lock them into a tax increase.

Still smarting from the criticism Democrats received from Reagan for advocating a tax hike during the 1984 presidential campaign, House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) repeated that he would oppose any tax increase legislation not supported by Reagan.

He added that Reagan’s tacit endorsement would not be enough: “We want him to say he embraces it.”

Gray noted that because the House plan would reduce the deficit below the Gramm-Rudman target, it could jettison the additional taxes in its budget if Reagan and House Republicans did not back them.

Unless Congress passes laws that put the deficit on track toward the Gramm-Rudman goal of balancing the budget by 1991, the law will force wide-ranging, automatic spending cuts that would replace lawmakers’ own spending priorities with what Rep. Marvin Leath (D-Tex.) called “a mindless, heartless formula.”

California’s congressmen joined the rest of the House in voting largely along party lines.